Listening to: The Andy Warhol Effect> - Strawpeople

Mel Bezar is now blogging.

Listening to: I Miss You - Blink 182

Every now and again you find a computer game that frustrates the daylights out of
you and you waste hours playing it. I have found another one.
This is the Flash game for the Dyson DC-11 vac.

Listening to: My Estranged Wife - Single Gun Theory

Last night I listened to Danny Hillis’ speech “Progress on the 10,000-year Clock” and “The Depopulation Problem” given by Phillip Longman. Both are well worth listening to. Both made me wish that I had invested in Airport network at home because lying in bed with your iPod is a bit naff. The speeches can be found here.

Listening to: The Sea of Core Experience - Single Gun Theory

IT Conversations has an interesting interview with William
Gibson. While the interview is primarily about Pattern
Recognition, his latest novel, he also covers Commoditization of Cool and how
this means the death of bohemia. The interview runs for about 18 mins.

Listening to: Transmission - Single Gun Theory

From BoingBoing:

Most of Microsoft’s efforts regarding Tsunami relief is focused internally. MS
offers a dollar for dollar charitable donation match to all FTE, and is doing everything
it can to expidite the process of trying to get the money to where it will do the
most good.

Listening to: Fluid - Lucid 3 

I stumbled on this when
browsing this morning:

One thing that both the 43 Things and Flickr teams have done is create a gregarious
piece of software: it doesn’t wall itself in, but interacts with other software, as
evidenced by my ability to post on 43 Things and this blog at the same time, and likewise
with photographs on Flickr.

The term “gregarious” is a much, much, better way of describing the abstract
concept of web services. People get “gregarious” much better than they
do “loosely coupled web enabled api”.

I also found this…43 Things… 
a sort of “these are my goals…who else is pursuing something similar?”

Listening to: Red World - Del Rey System

For a long time I have always maintained that corporations should not control national
health or education. This is not some lefty socialist thing… it’s just considering
the issue from a problem solving perspective. I think you get a “better”
health system if it is government run… by better I mean more “people oriented”.
Anecdotally a comparison of Canada and the US is enlightening… I am not saying that
privatization is the only contributor to the difference… but I would argue that
it is in the top five.

Corporations are crap at looking after people… but very good at looking after money.
I know this because I am involved in the day to day management of a company… you
are always faced with decisions that are made up of a person component and a profit
component. More often than not you are able to make a balance between the two… but
some times it is profit that wins out. The reality is that when you make a decision
in business profit (the bottom line) plays a huge role in that decision process…
how you add people to that mix is more based on your personal approach to the troops
than any particular monetary motive (there are always exceptions of course). The thing
about health and education are that they are intrinsically people heavy issues.

Governments, in turn, are somewhat better at after people (better in that they are
forced to make decisions that are composed more of “people”)… In a liberal
democratic society people play a large role in who is there (in parliament) and how
they got there. The decision makers are forced to make decisions on a time frame that
is great than the next 90 days (thou some would argue that the 3 year time frame is
still not long enough). These decisions are made with the constituency in mind.

I am not saying that governments are built properly for making people heavy decisions…
but what I am saying is that the decision making frameworks are vastly different.
The decision making framework for a corporation must place shareholder value
high up the scale. Governments must place voter needs high up the scale.
Intrinsically these lead to two different approaches to problems and two different
sets of acceptable decision pools. The key difference is the definition of “rational”
in both contexts. It only takes a week with the paper to realize that “rational”
is vastly different in both cases.

What sparked this little rant? This BBC World article on
why the markets have done very-well-thank-you in the wake of the Asian tidal wave.

Listening to: Beautiful Smile - Del Rey System

Found on Microsoft
Watch. Details of Bigtop… the grid computing initiative from MS:

Bigtop consists of three components, all written in C#, according developers who
said they were briefed by Microsoft. These are:

• Highwire: Highwire is a technology designed to automate the development of highly
  parallel applications that distribute work over distributed resources, the aforementioned
  sources said. Highwire is a programming language/model that will aim to make the testing
  and compiling of such parallel programs much simpler and more reliable.

• Bigparts: Bigparts is code designed to turn inexpensive PC devices into special-purpose
  servers, according to the sources. Bigparts will enable real-time, device-specific
  software to be moved off a PC, and instead be managed centrally via some Web-services-like
  model.

• Bigwin: According to sources close to Microsoft, Bigwin sounds like the ultimate
  manifestation of Microsoft’s “software as a service” mantra. In a Bigwin world, applications
  are just collections of OS services that adhere to certain “behavioral contracts.”
  These OS services can be provided directly by the core OS or even obtained from libraries
  outside of the core OS.

This WILL kick ass and it WILL enable new and interesting software. I am very keen
to see more of this. Why? Because MS is a developers company and they make fantastic
developer tools.

Listening to: Emerging Worldviews - Thomas Barnett

From Emerging Worldviews
- Thomas Barnett:

…connectivity coming into traditional societies, disproportionately empowering
women relative to men. If you want a society and its young males really pissed
off start messing with their definition of women.

This is a fascinating speech… well worth setting 30 odd mins aside for.

Listening to: Emerging Worldviews - Thomas Barnett

Found this on Rudy Ruckers blog.
It is a programmable computer based on ‘The Game of Life’:

These pages describe how we went about building a Wireworld computer. Although
at least one design exists for a tape-based Turing machine implemented in the `Game
of Life’, ours is, as far as we know, the first ever computer implemented as a cellular
automaton that you might reasonably want to write a program for. The design was done
by David Moore and Mark Owen, with the help of many others, between 1990 and 1992.
It’s a testament to our modesty that it was not until September 2004 that we wrote
up our work.